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My rebuild of my Intergraph workstation

Hosted by JWP on 2018-02-01 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license. Tags:Intergraph Corporation, Pentium 4, CentOS, Logical Volume Manager.Listen in ogg,
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Been going through my old work servers.

They typically run until I can't update them anymore and then sit not used until I have a bit of free time. So I have an old intergraph box in it that I new pentium 4 motherboard from about 8 years back. I had the receipt taped to the inside of the box. And the Expense statement from work. I had centos 6.0 on it try as it must It got no more updates and repros. It also has a weak PSU as I had to remove the DVD and graphics card to get to work.

About intergraph:

Intergraph Corporation is an American software development and services company. It provides enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software to businesses, governments, and organizations around the world. Intergraph operates through three divisions: Hexagon PPM, Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure, and Hexagon Geospatial. The company's headquarters is in Huntsville, Alabama, USA. In 2008, Intergraph was one of the 100 largest software companies in the world. In 2010, Intergraph was acquired by Hexagon AB. Intergraph was founded in 1969 as M&S Computing, Inc., by former IBM engineers who had been working with NASA and the U.S. Army in developing systems that would apply digital computing to real-time missile guidance. The company was later renamed to Intergraph Corporation in 1980. In 2000, Intergraph exited the hardware business and became purely a software company. On July 21, 2000, it sold its Intense3D graphics accelerator division to 3Dlabs, and its workstation and server division to Silicon Graphics. The companies incorporated SmartSketch, a drawing program used previously for the PenPoint OS and EO tablet computer. When Pen computing did not take off, SmartSketch was ported to the Windows and Macintosh platforms. https://www.cnet.com/news/intergraph-delivers-cheap-workstations/

The new TD-300 and TD-400 "Personal Workstations" offer 3D graphics capabilities equal to or below the prices of PCs configured as 3D workstations, the company said. The TD-300 and TD-400 Personal Workstations are available immediately, with prices starting at $5,495. http://www.intergraph.com/about_us/history_90s.aspx

So I have the ubuntu 32 bit work. And Suse Enterprise 12, tumbleweed and leap on hyperV. I had my Transmeta box on Debian I386 32 bit. So I need a redhat flavor. Since its 64 bit I picked CentOS. https://www.centos.org/

What is CentOS?

CentOS (/ˈsɛntɒs/, from Community Enterprise Operating System) is a Linux distribution that attempts to provide a free, enterprise-class, community-supported computing platform functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In January 2014, CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL, under a new CentOS governing board. In July 2010, CentOS overtook Debian to become the most popular Linux distribution for web servers, with almost 30% of all Linux web servers using it. Debian retook the lead in January 2012.

In January 2014, Red Hat announced that it would sponsor the CentOS project, "helping to establish a platform well-suited to the needs of open source developers that integrate technologies in and around the operating system". As a result of these changes, ownership of CentOS trademarks was transferred to Red Hat, which now employs most of the CentOS head developers; however, they work as part of Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team, which operates separately from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team. A new CentOS governing board was also established.

CentOS developers use Red Hat's source code to create a final product very similar to RHEL. Red Hat's branding and logos are changed because Red Hat does not allow them to be redistributed. CentOS is available free of charge. Technical support is primarily provided by the community via official mailing lists, web forums, and chat rooms. CentOS version numbers for releases older than 7.0 have two parts, a major version and a minor version, which correspond to the major version and update set of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) used to build a particular CentOS release. For example, CentOS 6.5 is built from the source packages of RHEL 6 update 5 (also known as RHEL version 6.5), which is a so-called "point release" of RHEL 6.

Starting with version 7.0, CentOS version numbers also include a third part that indicates the monthstamp of the source code the release is based on. For example, version number 7.0-1406 still maps this CentOS release to the zeroth update set of RHEL 7, while "1406" indicates that the source code this release is based on dates from June 2014. Using the monthstamp allows installation images to be reissued for (as of July 2014) oncoming container and cloud releases, while maintaining a connection to the related base release version.

Since mid-2006 and starting with RHEL version 4.4, which is formally known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 update 4, Red Hat has adopted a version-naming convention identical to that used by CentOS (for example, RHEL 4.5 or RHEL 6.5). AltArch releases are released by the Alternative Architecture Special Interest Group (AltArch SIG) to supporThere are three primary CentOS repositories (also known as channels), containing software packages that make up the main CentOS distribution: base - contains packages that form CentOS point releases, and gets updated when the actual point release is formally made available in form of ISO images. updates - contains packages that serve as security, bugfix or enhancement updates, issued between the regular update sets for point releases. Bugfix and enhancement updates released this way are only those unsuitable to be released through the CentOS-Fasttrack repository described below. addons - provides packages required for building the packages that make up the main CentOS distribution, but are not provided by the upstream. The CentOS project provides several additional repositories that contain software packages not provided by the default base and updates repositories. Those repositories include the following: CentOS Extras - contains packages that provide additional functionality to CentOS without breaking its upstream compatibility or updating the base components. CentOSPlus - contains packages that actually upgrade certain base CentOS components, changing CentOS so that it is not exactly like the upstream provider's content. CentOS-Testing - serves as a proving ground for packages on their way to CentOSPlus and CentOS Extras. Offered packages may or may not replace core CentOS packages, and are not guaranteed to work properly. CentOS-Fasttrack - contains bugfix and enhancement updates issued from time to time, between the regular update sets for point releases. The packages released this way serve as close candidates for the inclusion into the next point release. This repository does not provide security updates, and does not contain packages unsuitable for uncertain inclusion into point releases. CR (Continuous Release) - makes generally available packages that will appear in the next point release of CentOS. The packages are made available on a testing and hotfix basis, until the actual point release is formally released in form of ISO images. debuginfo - contains packages with debugging symbols generated when the primary packages were built contrib - contains packages contributed by CentOS users that do not overlap with any of the core distribution packages Software Collections - provides versions of software newer than those provided by the base distribution, see above for more details

The end of support on my box is currently 2024. During my setup I let the centos do something with LVM the drive had two WD 320GB disks. One was very hot so I moved it so it have some more air.

LVM:

In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a device mapper target that provides logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Most modern Linux distributions are LVM-aware to the point of being able to have their root file systems on a logical volume.

Heinz Mauelshagen wrote the original LVM code in 1998, taking its primary design guidelines from the HP-UX's volume manager. LVM is used for the following purposes: Creating single logical volumes of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks (somewhat similar to RAID 0, but more similar to JBOD), allowing for dynamic volume resizing. Managing large hard disk farms by allowing disks to be added and replaced without downtime or service disruption, in combination with hot swapping. On small systems (like a desktop), instead of having to estimate at installation time how big a partition might need to be, LVM allows filesystems to be easily resized as needed. Performing consistent backups by taking snapshots of the logical volumes. LVM can be considered as a thin layer of continuity and ease-of-use for managing hard drive replacement, repartitioning and backup. software layer on top of the hard disks and partitions, which creates an abstraction Basic functionality Volume groups (VGs) can be resized online by absorbing new physical volumes (PVs) or ejecting existing ones. Logical volumes (LVs) can be resized online by concatenating extents onto them or truncating extents from them. LVs can be moved between PVs. Creation of read-only snapshots of logical volumes (LVM1), or read-write snapshots (LVM2). VGs can be split or merged in situ as long as no LVs span the split. This can be useful when migrating whole LVs to or from offline storage. LVM objects can be tagged for administrative convenience. VGs and LVs can be made active as the underlying devices become available through use of the lvmetad daemon.

Setup with CentOS is not as simple as linux mint or ubuntu and very different than debian. You have to click and know a little about what you doing. For me with the basic 500GB install disk I got only a bare server with ssh. The machine was having power issues and would not boot from a usb stick so I had to go through 4 different DVD drives until I found one that worked with the DVD-R format. I had to use another deskop and power the DVD threw the other desk up connecting only the sata port the IDE drive was not working well either on this old board.

I had to remove the old centos 6 from the drives using Gparted. There were errors with the gparted but the centos installer worked great after I removed ext4 part of the lvms.

With GParted you can resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss,

Getting the mirrors working and getting it to work through a fire wall was pretty hard I had to make two config changes to the yum.conf one with the proxy address and the other to allow http cache. I also used export_proxy= to get it work globally. I had really trouble finding a fast mirror but I did not give up hope after a while it found fast mirrors that I got over 2MB per second from.

So I installed Gnome and made boot up at startup I will install x2go or vncserver on it also just in case I need it.

After some time of playing with it I was able to get it to fully update.

I then moved to the server room, got the IP address and connected it it from putty. I think the advantage of this box is that I will always have a Redhat 7 install ready to demo or learn something without having to setup a lot of things.

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